“DEARLY beloved: I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles”
Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake…. For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men:
We all know we live in a rapidly changing world. The family which once was the bedrock of civilization, a stable set of relationships set in a divine order, has been under attack from every quarter for quite some time. Just to name a few of the things which threaten: even with high rates of teen and out-of-wedlock pregnancies, high rates of abortion and contraception have brought us to a non-replacement rate of childbirth. High divorce rates, dead-beat dads and cohabitation, a government-imposed attempted redefinition of marriage, rampant substance abuse, domestic violence, growing numbers of adults and children on psychiatric drugs. Cybersex, internet pornography, websites for easy adultery and casual sexual hook-ups. Add to these rampant consumerism and debt which often leads to absentee parents, and you have a veritable mountain of challenges which makes those of us who strive to abide by the words of our epistle increasingly strangers and pilgrims in an increasingly strange land.
It can be overwhelming just to look at the news. So how do we maintain our witness in such a debilitating society?
“And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.”
There is no answer to any of this but to look to this Master who entered into a world which had already once become so corrupt and sinful that God sent a flood to reset the whole works. Christ didn’t just come into first century Palestine. He entered into the fullness of the human condition which faces all of those things I mentioned at the beginning. And only by entering into Him can we even hope to survive, and indeed have a witness to the madness around us.
The effects of the Incarnation, death and Resurrection of Christ are incredibly more far-reaching than we often imagine. A change has been made to the whole of the cosmos by Christ. And those who are baptized into His death and Resurrection are part of a process which is making us like Him as we cooperate with the work of His Spirit within us. This is our hope and reality regardless of what may be happening to the world around us.
All of those things I mentioned can be conquered in us by the Spirit, as we are living proof, epistles written in flesh and blood as St. Paul writes. And this is the hope for a world which still seems blind to the fact that their rejection of God and His Christ is leading them down a road to destruction, ruin and degradation. While we may hate the world that looks like that, our love for those we are entrusted to rescue from it keeps us proclaiming the Gospel of Truth even when it is ridiculed and rejected.
We must increasingly transfer our affections to a deeper realization of the joy of the life in Christ, a deeper realization that the mind of Christ is simply the mind that is filled with God, standing before Him at every moment in the honesty of our heart, without disguise or pretension.
If we can bring all of our lives, and those of our families, as far as we are able, in all their aspects into the central relationship of God in Christ – to seek to live by the Word of God, we will certainly appear as strangers and pilgrims in this world. But that alone will make room in our hearts for love for God and for our neighbor. That alone will bring us to salvation. And that alone will save a world which seeks to kill its own out of the ignorance of what happiness and well-being truly is – even as they hate their living death.
Having our “conversation honest among the Gentiles that with well doing we may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men.” Well-doing, not clever arguments or perfect theology.
We have no need to necessarily defend the truth which is Jesus Christ; We need only speak it and live it – the Holy Spirit will do the rest – that is His work in this world. We are to live and speak the Truth as it is in Christ, which will be salvation to some, and judgment to others – they and God will decide which it is. Remember, ours is not to make that decision – ours is simply to strive to live into Christ, and live out His commandments in our lives. The witness is in us. We are the living epistles. And as our lives conform to Jesus and the Gospel, we have done our part. We may be killed for it, but we have done our part.